So apparently Ozzfest is coming back this summer, and is coming back as a traveling tour again (as opposed to the one-off fest it was in 2008). And that’s all well and good, only… who’s gonna be on the bill?

Mayhem, which is basically Ozzfest 2.0, has already scooped up a lot of big-name bands for the summer, including many who have played multiple past Ozzfests – namely Korn, Rob Zombie, Lamb of God, Atreyu, Shadows Fall and Hatebreed, the latter of whom I think have been on something like 90% of all Ozzfests ever.

Add to that other Ozzfest alum like Chimaira, In This Moment and Norma Jean, and some bands the kids today all seem to like, such as Winds of Plague and They Who Shall Not Be Named, and, well, that’s a whole bunch of potential mainstage and second stage draws right there.

Then there’s the mini-fests like Summer Slaughter. I can’t tell you which bands we already know are booked for some of these tours without betraying a lot of people’s confidence, but I can tell you that some great bands are now no longer available for Ozzfest.

And, oh yeah, Megadeth, Slayer, and Testament are now doing their American Carnage tour in the summer, so they’re out.

So who’s left? After the jump, I’m going to play my favorite game: it’s called “over-think about something incredibly unimportant.”

Before we proceed, it’s worth noting that I’m going to try and be semi-realistic when moving forward with some barely-educated guesses about who’ll be playing Ozzfest. If a band already has summer tour dates booked, I’m going to assume they’re not avail, although I acknowledge that they could cancel those dates in favor of playing for a bigger crowd. And I’m not even going to bother with bands like Pig Destroyer, Sigh, and Salome – bands that will play Ozzfest right around the time Joey Belladonna’s solo band plays four sold-out headlining shows at Giants Stadium. Also, obviously not all of these bands are gonna end up on the bill – these are just bands I think could end up there.

And so, without further bullshit…

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The line-up for the 2010 Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival (Jesus I hate typing all that shit) has been announced. See who’ll be playing one of the summer’s biggest metal tours after the jump, along with my snarky commentary, of course…

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If you hit up Trivium’s most recent U.S. tour with Chimaira, you may have noticed an absence of drummer Travis Smith. When the tour started, the band said that Smith “will not be joining us on this leg and is home taking care of some personal business.” Filling-in for him on the tour was his drum tech, Maruta’s Nick Augusto.

Meanwhile, we’d heard some rumors from a pretty reputable source that Smith wasn’t coming back at all. We didn’t say anything at the time ’cause sometimes someone tells you something off the record and it’s not cool to print that kinda thing (even we’re not that dickish)… but now that Metal Underground is reporting the rumor, fuck it. We don’t think Smith is coming back to Trivium.

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It’s hard to believe that Dime has been gone for five years, but December 8 will be the anniversary of one of metal’s bleakest moments. To cash-in on commemorate the event, Metal Hammer have enlisted a bunch of well-known acts to record Pantera covers (but not Damageplan covers, because, y’know, let’s get real here) for a CD that will come with the magazine. Metal Hammer has done this a few times in the past – I remember they had they entire Master of Puppets album re-recorded by various bands, including Mastodon, Machine Head, Chimaira and Trivium when that album reached its twentieth anniversary, and some of it was pretty good.

Get the complete track list for Metal Hammer’s Dime tribute disc after the jump, along with my thoughts in bold.

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These are fun. You guys have been sending in a LOT of links… here’s the best of the best, in this blogger’s humble opinion.

• Painted in Exile: At first I was skeptical of Byron W.’s claim that this Sumeriancore act is “quite interesting”… but it’s true. They’ve got a unique slant to their djenty sound.
• Keith Merrow: An extremely well-produced one-man metal outfit based out of Portland, OR… if you like Periphery (Misha Mansoor), new Decapitated drummer Krimh’s solo stuff, or the Chronicles of Israfel (about whom I posted last week), you’ll definitely dig this. [Thanks: David Blanton]
• Ryashon: Says MS reader Jason Lawson, “they’re two brothers, not ‘bruthas’, from PA that are in seperate [sic] mediocre death/metalcore bands. But together they’re…well, they’re just awesome.” This is truth. Epic instru-metal.
• Dissipate: Quality brutal tech-death sent in by their drummer, Jeff.
• Eyeless: Another (1) talented French metal band… kind of Chimaira-y, maybe just a little bit more technical. Fitting then that Mark Hunter did some guest vocals on their new album; God Forbid’s Doc Coyle does a guest guitar solo, too. [Thanks: Djabthrash]

I love the end of the year. I mean, I hate the cold fucking weather, I hate the getting fucking dark outside early, I think the holidays are fucking retarded, New Year’s is a total fucking pain in the pass, and then starting in January no good movies come out for a least a month or two. So that all blows.

But the lists… Ah, the lists! So much arguing to be done over what is really just the opinion of one person or possibly a congregation of a few people! Behold as all the frail egos collapse under the need to have their opinion justified by someone they will never admit they perceive as “important” regardless of the fact that everyone eats and breathes and shits the same way! OH MY GOD, I HAVE SEEN THE MADNESS, AND THE MADNESS IS FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC.

So. We’re still more than a month away from publishing our own year-end lists here at MetalSucks, but by n0w all those big glossy analog blogs will have collected their staffs’ lists (’cause they gotta get that shit done way in advance, whereas us nerdonauts can procrastinate like we was gettin’ a one-time-only blow job from Bobbie Brown circa 1990), I know of at least one other blog with a looming deadline for all such lists, and now Metal Hammer has proclaimed that “Every day from now until Christmas, we will be revealing a different band/member of a band’s top albums of the year.”

You can see all the lists here. Musicians who have weighed in thus far include Lamb of God’s Chris Adler and Chimaira’s Mark Hunter. Hey, both those dudes were also cool enough to vote in our 21 albums poll! Awesome! So now you can go give Metal Hammer shit for a change.

-AR

Last night Vince and I hit up the Trivium/Chimaira/Whitechapel/Dirge Within show at Irving Plaza here in NYC. I will never ever get sick of watching Chimaira live. They have a forty-five minute set on this tour, and they really make the most of it by basically segueing directly from one song to the next with a minimum of on-stage banter, presumably in order to allow a maximum of brutality. To top it off, the set-list was pretty much perfect – they played at least one or two songs from each of their albums (This Present Darkness excluded), and not always they song(s) you’d expect, either. Definitely go check ‘em out!

Here they are doing “Severed” at the Download Festival in 2007. They played this song last night and the pit just went insane – I think this has to be the heaviest track on Pass Out of Existence, no?

-AR

Thanks to “Adam Adams” for sending the below preview footage from new Todd Bell-directed Chimaira DVD, which is set to be released in 2010. It’s the second preview we’ve gotten, after last week’s awesome footage of the band performing “The Disappearing Sun.” This time we get to see the band prepping just before they take the stage in Belgium, and then we get some “The Venom Inside” live footage. Nice.

Chimaira are on tour right now with Trivium, Whitechapel and Dirge Within; you can get dates here. Vince and I are going Thursday. It should go without saying that we’re very excited.

-AR

Today I want to talk about acrostics. For those of you who didn’t waste ridiculous amounts of money on a college English degree, an acrostic is when the first letter of each line of a text spell out a message. For example, below is an acrostic from lines 510-514 of book nine of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost:

Scipio the highth of Rome. With tract oblique
At first, as one who sought access, but feard
To interrupt, side-long he works his way.
As when a Ship by skilful Stearsman wrought
Nigh Rivers mouth or Foreland, where the Wind…

This is pretty neat, and, needless to say, it’s not a coincidence. Milton was a smart guy – he read himself blind, for crying out loud. And, of course, acrostics have been used in lots and lots of other pieces of literature.

The reason I bring this up is two-fold:

1. Yesterday former The Panic Channel vocalist/MTV VJ Steve Isaacs tweeted about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of a California legislative finance bill. It seems that the Governator used an acrostic to tell the California State Assembly “FUCK YOU.” Take a look for yourself here.
2. I re-tweeted Isaacs’ tweet, which in turn lead to longtime reader Saul Hudson shooting me an e-mail pointing out an acrostic in the lyrics to the title track from Chimaira’s Resurrection (video above).

If you’re not familiar with Resurrection, here’s a little background you need for the acrostic to make sense: the album was the band’s first after their acrimonious (or at least semi-acrimonious) parting with Roadrunner Records, and the lyrics to said title track (example: “Free at least/Finally tasting happiness”) are generally accepted as being about the split.

With me so far? Okay. So here’s the acrostic from the song:

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There’s been so much awesome metal this year that even thinking about doing a 2009 “best of” list gives me so much agita that I have already devoted at least one and possibly three complete therapy sessions to the topic. But one album that I know has a reserved spot on that list: Chimaira’s The Infection. It came out in April and it’s still in my regular rotation, for crying out loud.

So. Videographer Todd Bell has been out on the road with the band this entire tour cycle working on what will be his forth totally excellent DVD for Chimaira, and now the band has decided to share a preview of what Bell has brewing. Per a statement on the band’s website:

We’re so excited about the footage we shot with Todd Bell for our new DVD release (due out in 2010) that we couldn’t wait to share it. Here is “The Disappearing Sun” live from Helsinki, Finland.

Here’s the clip. “The Disappearing Sun” is one of my favorite tracks of off The Infection, and it looks like it slays live:

The site also says that the group’s tenth annual Chimaira Christmas show, which will take place on December 27 at the Cleveland House of Blues, will be filmed for the DVD. I’ve given serious consideration to making my first visit to Cleveland for one of these shows every year for the past five years; maybe this is the year I finally get off my ass and do it.

-AR

Thanks to all my fellow infected Chimairacans who e-mailed me about this. And, yep, I just made up a word.

Dude, I haven’t played Guitar Hero (or Rock Band, for that matter) in for-ever. But apparently their song “Graves of Opportunity” is available as part of a track pack for Guitar Hero world tour, alongside an awesome Chimaira song (“Walking On Broken Glass”) and something by a band I don’t care to mention who are named after a Meryl Streep movie, so maybe it’s time I picked up my plastic guitar and rocked out again.

The “Graves of Opportunity” certainly gives me the desire to do so – I mean, it looks like it was more fun to film than it is to watch. Phil Labonte looks like he’s having a good time, at least.

If there really were Unearth avatars for Guitar Hero, it would be awesome if when you hit “overdrive” or whatever the fuck it’s called, the digital Ken Susi would spit in the air, catch it in his hand, and then run it through his hair. Ah. I can dream, can’t I?

“Graves of Opportunity” comes off of Unearth’s excellent album The March, which is out on Metal Blade now.

-AR

There’s a lyric in the song “Hour of Rats” from Fed Through the Teeth Machine, the album by The Red Chord, and this particular lyric has really taken hold in my brain as of late: “WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER TOO LONG TO BE FRIENDS.” What a simple, beautiful statement that I can 110% relate to these days. Hm.

Speaking of The Red Chord…

• We’re streaming The Red Chord’s new album, Fed Through the Teeth Machine, through Monday! It’s awesome, so definitely give it a listen, then go buy it when Metal Blade releases it on Tuesday, October 27! We also spoke to The Red Chord’s Mike “Gunface” McKenzie.
• We got a European tour wrap-up from Chimaira’s Mark Hunter, had a nice chat with Kowloon Walled City’s Jason Pace, and even played nice with Oceano’s Andrew Mikhail.
• Lord Gold from Horse the Band graced us with another awesome tour blog, Eyal discussed physical CDs, and Dallas explored the evolution and importance of deathcore.
• We checked out new releases from Converge, Ancestors, and Smite the Righteous.
• Janet Reno quit Attack Attack!
• We’re fairly certain that Dave Mustaine is still a Megadick. Actually, we’re positive.

Have a good weekend everyone…

-AR

Photo by Mart Reinson

While winding down their recent European trek with Unearth, Daath and Throwdown, Mark Hunter, vocalist of perennial MetalSucks favorites Chimaira, was cool enough to answer some questions via e-mail. After the jump, get Mark’s thoughts on European audiences versus American audiences, eating at McDonald’s abroad, the joys of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, showers in Germany, and more.

And by the way, there’s a NSFW image in this interview. You were warned.

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Shady times in Poland. We were a little bummed to begin with. Warsaw was coming up and we found out that Behemoth was playing in the same town as us. In their homeland. Ouch. When you get news like that your first feelings are, “Why bother with our show? Why not go hang out at their show?” That’s never a good idea. I remember when we were on the Dark Funeral/Naglfar tour in 2007 and we hit Phoenix, Arizona the same day as Behemoth and Job For a Cowboy. It seemed like a serious bummer, but somehow there were still around 200 kids at our show, which was on par for that tour. Same thing happened on this tour. There were like 400-500 kids at our show. I heard there were 2,500 people at the Behemoth show, but still, 400-500 kids made for good times.

The crowd was enthusiastic and other than the intense heat onstage, I thought it was great times. The promoter was super cool. The food spread he gave us was fit for an army. So many different kinds of everything. Meats, cheeses, breads, drinks, cereals, candies, fruits, yogurts, spreads, etc., etc., etc. His dinner was amazingly catered as well. So many different choices of pastas, meats, salads. The backstage area was huge. We were treated great.

Until the end of the night, that is.

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I am SO PISSED that I missed Chimaira’s most recent tour (with Hatebreed), because a) Chimaira slay live and b) I’m fucking dying to hear some more material from The Infection in a live setting – when I saw the band on this spring’s Music as a Weapon tour, the album had literally just come out that day and the band were, consequently, only playing two new songs.

So. Rhythm guitarist Matt DeVries had to pull a Mark Morton and leave the tour early so he could get home for the birth of his new child, Austin (Mazel tov, Matt!); filling in for him is Daath co-guitarist/all around cool dude Emil Werstler. I am using this little fact as an excuse to post this video I saw on Blabbermouth of the Wersterful Chimaira performing “The Venom Inside.” Also, to point out that bassist Jim LaMarca seems to have shed his signature locks. That leaves DeVries as the only dude in Chimaira capable of windmilling. Just sayin’.

Chimaira continue to decimate Europe alongside Unearth, Throwdown, and our friends in Daath through October 12; then, at the end of the month, they hit the States again with Trivium, Whitechapel and Dirge Within. Get dates here.

-AR

First of all, I have to say, if you’re into Muse then check out their new album, The Resistance, which comes out today. It’s fucking brilliant. They always manage to take a different approach from album to album, and this one continues on that path. Anyways, its great stuff and I recommend it highly.

I’ve had music writing on my mind a lot these days. Maybe its because I have a lot on my plate. The record I’m doing with Emil from DAATH and Cynic’s Sean Reinert needs to be delivered by the first of the year. It’s going to be released in the spring of 2010. My side project wants to record an EP of still to be written material this December. And last but not least, DAATH is looking to go into the studio in April to record our next one. We’d like for it to be out by the end of Summer 2010.

That’s a shit load of music to write in a very short period of time if you consider that we’re still touring. Some advice I get from people is “Don’t rush.” That’s good advice. None of this is going to be rushed and it will all get what it needs and wants so that it can grow into the work of art it deserves to become. I think I’ve figured out how to write on the road and this next tour will be the perfect situation for that. We are sharing the bus with a straightedge band. Can’t be partying like usual because my health could relapse. Instead of staring into space and wishing I could party, I’ll occupy my time with creative things. So I’ll be writing music on the road. And a lot of it!

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If you read this site regularly, you’re already aware that I’m a huge Chimaira fan. In fact, I pride myself on knowing way too much about them.

I guess I haven’t officially reached stalker status yet, though, because until I read this interview with Chimaira lead guitarist Rob Arnold, I had no idea that the dude had another band – The Elite.

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I listened to The Infection over the weekend for the first time in a little while. Guess what? Still kills. I can’t wait to see some of this shit played live.

Here’s a not-so-great quality bootleg of the band playing the first cut off the album, “The Venom Inside.” As Vince says, “This song just makes me happy.” What a killer way to open the show. Sounds like the crowd is almost as loud as Mark Hunter.

Friendly reminder: Chimaira are on tour right now with Hatebreed, Dying Fetus, Toxic Holocaust and Winds of Plague. Then they head to Europe in September with Unearth, Throwdown, and our friends in Daath. You can get all the tour dates here.

-AR

Where the hell does the time go? The year is more than half over already! Sheesh.

ANYWAY, here are, in alphabetical order, albums that have really knocked my socks off so far this year…

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Even if you’re one of those people who only listen to metal, hardcore, or other such heavy music styles, you have to concede the fact that many of the musicians you love do not share that singular devotion to one genre. Some artists go even further and apply their broad tastes to the music they make. (Mike Patton might be one of the best examples of this.) That being said, I was admittedly quite surprised to learn that Melvins drummer Dale Crover plays on indie rocker Lou Barlow’s forthcoming solo album Goodnight Unknown. And not just on one track…

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